It would be great if they didn't name things to similar things that already exist. Raspberry Pi is quite popular and I think it should be known for the author.
If you are worried about agents diverging from user intent why not log user messages in a file, and make it a point to review this file against plans and executed work? In my own harness nothing the user types gets lost. It might be the most valuable piece of documentation in the project - the raw message log. I am only keeping user side, which is pretty thin, it's enough to figure out what happened. Logging messages to a file is just a matter of adding a user message submit hook, it costs nothing until used.
The human refuses to do it because another human (the user who opened the issue) also refused to do it. If the user asked the machine to do it, and didn't even bother to verify the output, why should the maintainer read it?
The use of that "clanker" term drove me to the punt where I couldn't read anything beyond it. All I can think of every time I see it is how closely it relates to the "n-word" and all that accompanying history. Yet another repeat, with another target.
Author here. This visceral reaction to the term fascinates me. You’re not the only person here that mentioned it and it makes me wonder where that is coming from.
We’re naming a machine here, not a human being. Even if it was a slur (I don’t consider it one) it would be directed at a piece of equipment.
I find it fascinating because I don’t think people would bat an eye if that term was used for a hammer or keyboard. Yet somehow it changes when applied to an LLM based machinery. Craftspeople often apply jargon to their tools, much of which is neutral to negative.
To me clearly a result—and maybe a prime example—of the anthropomorphising of LLMs. It comes off as (slightly) derogatory, and that plus this fact likely triggers something akin to a racism response in some.
I guess providers will look to (further?) exploit this for marketing/strategic purposes so we should be very aware of such an important bias.
The term was adopted in Star Wars and has been used in science fiction before and after it too. It probably sits somewhere on some scale but it has always been used in literature as a term for machines and from that perspective I find it appropriate.
A machine does not have feelings. If you call your power drill a piece of shit you are not overstepping any bounds either.
Well maybe other people are different, but I'd feel uncomfortable using a slur against things as well as people. I don't have many qualms about using an insult to a specific item if I feel it's warranted, but using a racial slur is stepping over a line for me. I'd call a black person a twat if they were being a twat, but I wouldn't use the n words against them, no matter how much of a twat they were being
Where to me this discussion completely goes in a questionable direction is the idea that there are slurs against inanimate objects and that you would put that into the same category as derogatory terms against humans.
The reason you don’t insult other humans should be obvious, but none of that translates to machines. From my perspective it’s a grave mistake that we’re even remotely entertaining the idea right now that LLMs are sentient.
From that perspective I really quite appreciate the term. That said, I can see that it really seems to trigger some folks. I’m not sure we have found the right language to refer to what we have.
Whereas I don't think justifying the use of a slur, a word that is commonly used to be derogatory, is a good thing, even when using it in other contexts. "It's ok because its not a human" feels dangerously close to justifications for using the n word in the past
That wasn't an issue (at my end), and oddly enough, for whatever reason, the web.archive.org link you provided no longer comes with the same overlay on the second and third invocations ...
My apologies, it was a real sighting of something that I don't have the time right now to reproduce and investigate further <shrug>.
This article also - unironically - says, that building a data center near specifically black people is literally racism. Don't waste your time reading this garbage.
The article covers various opinions expressed by various people, one person
Moya Bailey, a professor at Northwestern University who specializes in the representation of race and gender in the media,
expressed several opinions at various strengths. including:
Bailey also points out that racism within the AI industry goes as far as the actual methods used to power it. She references the negative health impact of xAI data centers in a Memphis neighborhood called Boxtown, which is 90 percent Black, as an example of environmental racism inflicted by the AI industry.
If you disagree with Bailey you should say why.
It's worth noting that her objections stem from clean air violations outlined here:
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is belching smog-forming pollution into an area of South Memphis that already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.
None of the 35 methane gas turbines that help power xAI’s massive supercomputer is equipped with pollution controls typically required by federal rules.
I know that there is a lot of AI psychosis going on, but I don't have to subscribe to that. I consider it very problematic that we have some industry leaders (eg: Anthropic with their model wellbeing) that are seriously throwing that type of thinking into the room.
Maybe that's the jargon to use to avoid us anthropomorphizing this technology. What is it if not a clanker that spits out random non-deterministic bullshit depending on time of the day and generosity of these providers?
I also find this sentiment to be a uniquely American phenomenon. They tend to see racism and discrimination where it has no place being. My impression is that they have dreams about it. Bonkers to me.
First I've heard of this myself, from an article on recent usage:
As one of the original creators to make clanker-themed TikToks, Stewart, who goes by Chaise online, was dubbed the “clanker guy” by his fanbase after racking up millions of views. But in August, the 19-year-old content creator, who is Black, announced that he would no longer be publishing any more videos on the subject. The joke, he said, and responses to it, had become racist.
“When I go into my comment section and people are starting to call me ‘cligger’ and ‘clanka’ or ‘you’re a dirty clanker’—not voicing those slurs at AI and electronics, but at me—I don’t find that entertaining or funny at all,” Stewart explains in the video.
...
On TikTok and Instagram, however, the ongoing backlash against AI has taken on the form of short video skits, envisioning a future where robots have been fully incorporated into society. The term “clanker,” along with “tinskins,” “wirebacks,” and “oil bleeders” are used as pejoratives in these skits. But some of these skits appear to be using clankers as stand-ins for Black people, perpetuating racist tropes and scenarios that harken back to a pre–Civil Rights era.
In one skit, creator Samuel Jacob dresses up in a police officer’s uniform and throws out phrases such as, “Don’t you know clankers sit in the back of the bus, Rosa Sparks?” and “Come on George Droid, looks like it’s jail time for you, rust monkey.” Another skit by TikTokker Stanzi Potenza depicts a waitress at a diner acting out a scenario in which she’s refusing service to the subject with the words “pov: you’re a clanker in 2050” sprawled across the screen. Speaking in a Southern drawl, she tells the camera, “Didn’t you see the sign outside? We don’t serve clankers here.” The caption underneath the video is a variation of a common phrase often used by people to defend their own prejudices: “Don’t worry, I have robot friends.”
Clearly there's been some strong parallelism in usages of clanker and nagger, just as there were in usages of ginger and its anagram by Tim Minchin in his song Prejudice.
As I understand it, "clanker" was a term created in star wars for people to refer to droids in a deliberately derogatory way. It is quite literally a racial slur created in a fictional universe, which people are now using against AI programs. Even I don't like it, and I'm pretty heavily anti-LLM
There are many races in star wars, not all of which are humans. You could be racist against Gungans or Twi'lek if you wanted. Droids in star wars could be interpreted as fairly close to human in some cases, but are used as a slave race in probably a majority of cases
Honestly, that's a weird reaction. I don't follow modern programmer slang but even I caught onto "clanker" as meaning "old clanky robot/automaton thing". It has absolutely no relations to negative verbiage about different kinds of people.
I hate to say "check yourself", but this time maybe. Maybe with a lot of ...
> To me, clanker is a much preferable term for agent. Agency lies with humans, not with machines
We give machines agency all the time. Look up the definition of agency in any dictionary. Other than the specific usages ("a business", "a government organization"), the main definitions are "action, power, operation", "the office or function of an agent", "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power", "a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved", etc.
Your car does all those things when it generates power and applies them to the wheels. You tell it what to do, but it has agency in doing the work. It even uses intelligence in how it does the work, varying the amounts of fuel and air based on an array of sensors, creating maps of common driving patterns. You, the human have absolutely no agency regarding how it does those things (unless you bring along a laptop and wire in very specific software to take agency away from the machine).
I think "clanker" is intended to be a slur for insulting a machine one does not like. It's akin to the epithet "skinjob" given to humanoid robots in various science fiction. One should never use slurs, even against inanimate objects. They create prejudice in thinking that prevents purely rational thought and leads to fallacious conclusions. They also create a behavioral condition where it's okay to use slurs (as long as nobody's complaining about it). If you want to be logical and rational, just call the machine what it actually is, rather than this emotive poetic label.
To me “clanker” is a derogatory word that just sounds ugly. I recoil when I hear them use it. Perhaps it my anglo background, and it sounds different/better to German speakers.
I've chosen to define "agency" as pretty much "the thing that humans can do and agents can't". To me, agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals.
Being able to say "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter.
> agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals
If a company you work for tells you to do something, and you do it, did you have agency? Was it their goal you were accomplishing? Or was it your goal to make money?
> "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter
Do you think people wouldn't matter anymore if they cease to write code? People didn't used to write code. Code didn't even exist before. Now they don't have to do the thing they didn't used to have to do.
> Setting software agents loose on the world to make their own top-level decisions about what they're going to do is a great way to infuriate
I remember the first time I encountered a trojan horse virus. I was probably 14, sitting in the computer lab. I opened a document, and a program started going to town on the documents, program settings, etc. It opened up browsers to sites we weren't supposed to go to, uploaded passwords to a remote site, changed the desktop background. I thought it was pretty cool!
I wondered how it was that the program could do all these things. I wondered about the motivations of the person who infected the document with the trojan. I wondered why the school administrators didn't do something to prevent this from happening. But I didn't feel any negative feeling towards the trojan; it was just doing what it was programmed to do, on computers that let it do those things.
Later I patched the computers so the trojans couldn't infect the machines anymore. I was banned from the computer lab for unauthorized modifications to school property. Apparently agency is not always worth exercising.
I guess loaded derogatory terms are somehow worse than otherwise worse-sounding terms. Think about it in the context of e.g. the n-word. “A piece of shit”, while sounding very bad:
1. is generic, can be applied to anything thus has no discrimination component, and
2. ends there. It has no history, no reference to previous usage, etc.
I wanna say Berkeley Mono [1] because it's what I use and it looks very familiar, but I'm generally bad at font stuff. I typed out the text from the image and looked at it side by side and didn't notice anything obviously different, but some glyphs also have multiple variants so who knows.
My feeling is that building agent with agent will be the first stable & mature software development pattern emerging. I reached that in several forward-looking induction:
1. If agent is continuing the path to trivialize software development, which appears the case given LLMs can generate better quality code than humans almost for free & instantly given the right context, then using agent to develop software is going to happen, but that destroys the whole software industry as writing software is marginally free, that break the foundations of software industry
2. To continue making agent a commercially viable thing, it needs to develop more valuable artifacts. Then specialized agent will be the more valuable thing than software, as they offer a higher-level of output than existing software. And because the natural jagged pattern of LLM capability, one can use frontier model to develop domain-specialized agents with 1/10 the running cost. So agent writing agents makes economical sense.
3. In terms of knowledge, building agents is like managing highly-skilled team of humans to work on highly-unpredicatble requirements, just like companies are built on top of the thesis that a group of human offer better value than one do that themselves, a team building agents essientially can produce specialized agents for other company to mix & match & optimize, sot that also makes economical sense.
4. Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents, It's like the difference between building commercial software vs building hobby software. That makes engineering sense to have agents building agent as the dominant pattern of software development.
Human is asking the machine to do what the human themselves refuses to do, while calling it a clanker. Why should it?
/ducks
We’re naming a machine here, not a human being. Even if it was a slur (I don’t consider it one) it would be directed at a piece of equipment.
I find it fascinating because I don’t think people would bat an eye if that term was used for a hammer or keyboard. Yet somehow it changes when applied to an LLM based machinery. Craftspeople often apply jargon to their tools, much of which is neutral to negative.
I guess providers will look to (further?) exploit this for marketing/strategic purposes so we should be very aware of such an important bias.
The term was literally created in star wars to use as a racial slur against droids
A machine does not have feelings. If you call your power drill a piece of shit you are not overstepping any bounds either.
The reason you don’t insult other humans should be obvious, but none of that translates to machines. From my perspective it’s a grave mistake that we’re even remotely entertaining the idea right now that LLMs are sentient.
From that perspective I really quite appreciate the term. That said, I can see that it really seems to trigger some folks. I’m not sure we have found the right language to refer to what we have.
The direct wired link is: https://www.wired.com/story/the-ai-slur-clanker-has-become-a...
A full readable 7 month old snapshot is: https://archive.md/gH1f5
My apologies, it was a real sighting of something that I don't have the time right now to reproduce and investigate further <shrug>.
It's worth noting that her objections stem from clean air violations outlined here:
~ https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...You are certain about things that experts in philosophy/consciousness/AI can't agree on.
That should make you pause, not plow ahead.
I also find this sentiment to be a uniquely American phenomenon. They tend to see racism and discrimination where it has no place being. My impression is that they have dreams about it. Bonkers to me.
Clearly there's been some strong parallelism in usages of clanker and nagger, just as there were in usages of ginger and its anagram by Tim Minchin in his song Prejudice.
Because it's cool to be substratist against robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RXkKh8fb6E
I hate to say "check yourself", but this time maybe. Maybe with a lot of ...
We give machines agency all the time. Look up the definition of agency in any dictionary. Other than the specific usages ("a business", "a government organization"), the main definitions are "action, power, operation", "the office or function of an agent", "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power", "a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved", etc.
Your car does all those things when it generates power and applies them to the wheels. You tell it what to do, but it has agency in doing the work. It even uses intelligence in how it does the work, varying the amounts of fuel and air based on an array of sensors, creating maps of common driving patterns. You, the human have absolutely no agency regarding how it does those things (unless you bring along a laptop and wire in very specific software to take agency away from the machine).
I think "clanker" is intended to be a slur for insulting a machine one does not like. It's akin to the epithet "skinjob" given to humanoid robots in various science fiction. One should never use slurs, even against inanimate objects. They create prejudice in thinking that prevents purely rational thought and leads to fallacious conclusions. They also create a behavioral condition where it's okay to use slurs (as long as nobody's complaining about it). If you want to be logical and rational, just call the machine what it actually is, rather than this emotive poetic label.
Being able to say "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter.
Setting software agents loose on the world to make their own top-level decisions about what they're going to do is a great way to infuriate Rob Pike https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/ or unfairly attack the reputation of Scott Shambaugh https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... or waste the time of your local police permit office and suppliers https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm
If a company you work for tells you to do something, and you do it, did you have agency? Was it their goal you were accomplishing? Or was it your goal to make money?
> "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter
Do you think people wouldn't matter anymore if they cease to write code? People didn't used to write code. Code didn't even exist before. Now they don't have to do the thing they didn't used to have to do.
> Setting software agents loose on the world to make their own top-level decisions about what they're going to do is a great way to infuriate
I remember the first time I encountered a trojan horse virus. I was probably 14, sitting in the computer lab. I opened a document, and a program started going to town on the documents, program settings, etc. It opened up browsers to sites we weren't supposed to go to, uploaded passwords to a remote site, changed the desktop background. I thought it was pretty cool!
I wondered how it was that the program could do all these things. I wondered about the motivations of the person who infected the document with the trojan. I wondered why the school administrators didn't do something to prevent this from happening. But I didn't feel any negative feeling towards the trojan; it was just doing what it was programmed to do, on computers that let it do those things.
Later I patched the computers so the trojans couldn't infect the machines anymore. I was banned from the computer lab for unauthorized modifications to school property. Apparently agency is not always worth exercising.
It reads that way to me, and feels bad. We can just say "computer program" or similar.
What about other objects like an old car?
[1] https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono
Or maybe one that's imitating it.
1. If agent is continuing the path to trivialize software development, which appears the case given LLMs can generate better quality code than humans almost for free & instantly given the right context, then using agent to develop software is going to happen, but that destroys the whole software industry as writing software is marginally free, that break the foundations of software industry
2. To continue making agent a commercially viable thing, it needs to develop more valuable artifacts. Then specialized agent will be the more valuable thing than software, as they offer a higher-level of output than existing software. And because the natural jagged pattern of LLM capability, one can use frontier model to develop domain-specialized agents with 1/10 the running cost. So agent writing agents makes economical sense.
3. In terms of knowledge, building agents is like managing highly-skilled team of humans to work on highly-unpredicatble requirements, just like companies are built on top of the thesis that a group of human offer better value than one do that themselves, a team building agents essientially can produce specialized agents for other company to mix & match & optimize, sot that also makes economical sense.
4. Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents, It's like the difference between building commercial software vs building hobby software. That makes engineering sense to have agents building agent as the dominant pattern of software development.
WDYT?
Why would that be different?
1. They behave differently: non-deterministic vs deterministic
2. They have different mechanism: harness+llms vs codes+apis
3. They have different interfaces: clicking vs chatting
They are like boston dynamics robots vs humans